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Julie188 writes "Opera Software's year-old antitrust complaint against Microsoft took another step toward being vindicated, and the Oslo-based browser maker can't help crowing over the European Commission's decision. Opera had filed a complaint with the EC in December, 2007, contending that Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows violated antitrust rules. Yesterday, the EC sent a 'Statement of Objections (SO)' to Microsoft with a preliminary finding that bundling IE with Windows does indeed constitute an antitrust abuse. Microsoft has eight weeks to plead its case and change the EC's mind, an unlikely outcome if ever there was one. Opera's CEO said, 'On behalf of all Internet users, we commend the Commission for taking the next step towards restoring competition in a market that Microsoft has strangled for more than a decade.'"

Yes a list of software licences not easily found on their site will really help when someone is deciding what to buy at the shop or when installing an OS and leaving them with no internet service at the time.

Sure they could research this beforehand but what I've learned from the Ubuntu laptop topic is that the average person is a moron and fans of MS think this is acceptable. Which means they'll never find that URL so it effectively doesn't exist. Which makes MS happy because they, like most software com

This is why I pirate. It's a form of protest against software, music, or video makers who happily take my money but refuse to provide any kind of guarantee for return. Even food manufacturers provide a "satisfaction guaranteed or money back" warranty. There's no reason why software, music, and video companies can't do the same.

Oh, and posting the terms on an internet site is worthless for customers who don't have internet. The terms should be revealed at point-of-sale, not hidden inside the box. It's j

Its hard to deny that MS has gotten where is has through quality or good practices. I hope the EU does what we should have, and slaps them hard on behalf of all the consumers and competitors they have swindled.

I respect your point, however I do think that monopolistic anti-competitive practices by nature ARE anti-consumer. You also forgot to mention the Mac, which I think is certainly a better desktop. You are not obliged to agree, however I think the UI and various MS "enhancements" presented in Vista show that clearly MS believes that they have some catching up to do. Lets not forget that IE became dominant through the illegal leveraging of Windows. Yes it was better then the competition, but because they cheat

That's not true AT all. IE became dominant because IE 4.x was much, much better than NN was as IE had a fully programmable object model and NN was stuck with a partially programmable one. Remember document.write?

I wish I could forget but that's all grandma will talk about if you mention computers.

For what it's worth, I think it's a pretty sad reflection on the Slashdot community that a post citing numerous specific cases where Windows might be considered superior to Linux has got hit with enough troll mods to make it disappear for most people, yet there are no replies actually countering the points made in that post. I guess abusing the mod system is easier than making a real argument.

IIRC the way Windows XP N was in Europe was that the user was presented with a choice of several non Microsoft media players at first run.

Nobody actually bought N (well, no OEMs, I'm sure a few people did out of principle). My guess is Microsoft tries to offer that as a combined product/SKU with the "no media player" editions and, failing that, it'll get it's own SKU.

Found it. Apparently when you double clicked a media file in the XP "N edition" it asked you to install Windows Media Player or Winamp:http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/09/windows-xp-n-edition-xp-without-media.html

My guess is OEMs will prebundle a browser and MS will include Opera on there (they started the complaint and have a smaller marketshare than Firefox currently). That is, if anybody buys it. (Apparently only 1,500 XP "N edition" disks have been ordered with no known sales...)

But even more importantly: The OEM's *CHOICE* of browser will be bundled with virtually all preinstalled systems by the OEM.

Right now they don't have a real choice. IE has to be installed, so they can have just IE, or IE+Firefox or IE+Opera, or IE+Firefox+Opera or so on. Given there is a tendency to avoid having multiple application that do about the same thing installed, everyone currently usually just winds up with IE.

Microsoft used its monopoly position to FORCE OEMs to not bundle other browsers (or lose their big discount.) THIS is wrong. Including a browser in the OS and using its functionality is NATURAL. Otherwise why would KDE and GNOME both include a browser? Trying to make Microsoft remove a part of the operating system (which after all is a way for a user to operate a computer, and includes the UI) is complete bullshit. I don't buy the argument that it's acceptable because they are a monopoly. Either fine the shit out of them, invoke the corporate death penalty, or leave them alone. I don't mind interfering with their ability to lie, cheat, and steal, but interfering with their ability to legitimately do business (e.g. put together a modern operating system with the features users now expect) is simply not acceptable. This whole thing is seriously just a whiny, passive-aggressive attempt to punish Microsoft for past misdeeds. Why not, you know, just punish them for past misdeeds?

Microsoft used its monopoly position to FORCE OEMs to not bundle other browsers (or lose their big discount.) THIS is wrong. Including a browser in the OS and using its functionality is NATURAL.

It sure is. But it also means that people are compelled to use the browser you bundled simply because it's always there. The rules are different when you're a monopolist as even something you throw in as a convenience feature could severely impact markets.

In this case Microsoft should't even be hit too hard - MSHTML will still be in the OS simply out of neccessity; it's simply the web browser GUI that gets axed. The only thing that would really break are badly programmed applications that ignore the default browser setting and directly call iexplore.exe.

Otherwise why would KDE and GNOME both include a browser? Trying to make Microsoft remove a part of the operating system (which after all is a way for a user to operate a computer, and includes the UI) is complete bullshit.

So essentially any program that ships on a Windows install DVD is sacrosanct for all times because it's part of the base install? If not, who decides which programs are neccessary for a modern operating system and which aren't? If we go by the classical OS definition, not even a GUI is required for an operating system; a mere hardware abstraction layer with process scheduling would suffice. We could go for an ISO standard, but that would require a committee and five years of deliberation time (plus ISO has been shown to be bribable).

It's possible to use Windows productively without using Internet Explorer so I'd guess having IE as part of the base install is not really necessary, especially as OEMs will bundle either IE or other browsers when building their systems.

I don't buy the argument that it's acceptable because they are a monopoly. Either fine the shit out of them,

Useless. If the EU whips up fines large enough to destroy Microsoft it'd either get hit by sanctions via WIPO or Microsoft would simply withdraw from the EU and work doubly hard to ensure its monopoly in other parts of the world - and complete incompatibility with all open standards to force Europe to import Windows anyway. If the fines even get through; Microsoft would make sure that the appeals suit would take decades.

invoke the corporate death penalty,

Impossible; Microsoft is not a European company and the EU is unlikely to take over the USA anytime soon. The EU can attack Microsoft's local subsidiaries but that's scarcely going to kill the corp - and, again, would probbly create bad consequences as the USA wouldn't appreciate such actions against one of the government's larger sponsors.

or leave them alone.

Which essentially means they can do whatever they want because the US government is bought off and nobody else has the power to outright destroy them. That's not a terribly good idea as Microsoft still controls the desktop OS market and is known to put any monopolies it has to their fullest use. Having Microsoft dictate the terms of desktop computing is not going to help the European IT industry in any way so there's little incentive to let it happen.

I don't mind interfering with their ability to lie, cheat, and steal, but interfering with their ability to legitimately do business (e.g. put together a modern operating system with the features users now expect) is simply not acceptable.

Completely stopping their business is okay but restricting it is wrong? By that logic, judges shouldn't issue restraining orders anymore because everyone should be either completely free or dead.

It's not like nobody would buy Windows anymore because it doesn't come with a browser. Every OEM will bundle something so for virtually everyone Windows still does come with one and the rest

With Windows Update? The average computer illiterate can choose from Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome... As an additional bonus, users will get used to installing programs from trusted channels instead of from any.exe they find on the Internet.

As far as I'm concerned MS still can bundle IE, I only need the ability to uninstall it after downloading $otherbrowser (and no, removing the IE shortcuts is not enough).

This is a stupid argument and you are a stupid person for having made it. HTML help and the Windows Explorer are two of the major applications which depend on IE. Unreal Tournament embeds IE to display the news. Winace embeds it to display its tips at start. You cannot "uninstall" IE from Windows without breaking not only Windows, but also a huge percentage of contemporary Windows applications.

The most you could possibly accomplish in a reasonable fashion would be to remove the iexplore.exe executable. This

The European Commission were the ones that actually got them to make "Windows N" without media player. And in that case I think MS could have actually left a few core "system-ish" files and still have met their requirements.

This time let's see a version of Windows that doesn't have MSHTML.DLL, SHDOCVW.DLL, or even WININET.DLL. Then perhaps developer finally will stop embedding IE or calling these files bypassing users choice of browser... Or perhaps not. Did Windows N actually ship to stores or get preloade

Fine. So Canonical, Red Hat, Novell, and the Debian Project are bundling browsers. No-one is saying OEMs shouldn't be able to do the same. The point is that the Linux Foundation isn't the one bundling. Also, the distributions don't tightly integrate Firefox into the rest of the system (in fact, Debian uses Epiphany by default). Removing it is a simple apt-get or yum.

My point exactly - bundling isn't a necessity. And, because of lack of bundling, we have choices. apt-get install lynx (or yum install or rpm -hiv or emerge) is just as simple, removal is simple, and, wait, we can chose a default browser rather then being given one!

I absolutely cannot stand IE as it is today, and so, I'm typing this post using Google Chrome on Windows Vista.

How does Opera even make an anti-trust argument when FireFox is gobbling up IE market share? For an increasing percentage of Windows users, IE is the thing you use to download some other browser.

From a consumer perspective, that a Linux distribution comes with Firefox is not really any different than a Windows distribution coming with IE. In both cases, I can go and get and use the browser that I

From a consumer perspective, that a Linux distribution comes with Firefox is not really any different than a Windows distribution coming with IE. In both cases, I can go and get and use the browser that I want to use.

There are two key differences. First, monopolies have to play by stricter rules than everyone else. Second, almost every Linux distribution comes with more than one browser, and an OEM is generally allowed to remove those and replace them with their favourite (or just ship without a browser). OEM's can't ship Windows without IE.

"Do you really want developers all installing versions of the browser core all over the OS with their applications?"

It would make more sense to me if they simply didn't require a web browser application.

If an application really did require a web browser, however, then it can ask for a browser application to be installed in a central location where the app and other apps can make use of any libraries. Doesn't seem silly to me.

In the old days there were plenty of application that would tell me "This program requires Internet Explorer to be installed". After MS started bundling it, developers seemed to get lazier and just assumed it was installed and/or that I would want to install it.

I have an idea. Let's go and sue Linux distributions for bundling free and open source browsers with it, because it wrecks the market for my $40 closed source browser!

Sure, go ahead. Daniel Wallace tried that [wikipedia.org] a couple of years ago, with a very similar argument. He claimed that he wanted to sell his own operating system, and that the GPL amounted to price fixing at zero, and thus Linux was hindering him from selling his own OS.

In short, the court didn't like that argument. He tried to amend his complain several times, but those amended complaints didn't fly either. But if you feel like paying for nothing, go ahead and sue.

Why does everyone think you need a browser to download something. It's not like HTTP is a protocol made for downloading files.How about FTP, p2p, or an add/remove programs that actually adds programs.

It doesn't have to be hard. I cannot believe so many people on slashdot actually think you need a browser to download a file. A lot of times a browser uses FTP anyway to download something. Now I will agree that most people have become accustomed to having a browser pre-installed. I'll even agree that it can be useful. But it absolutely is not necessary for downloading.

So your proposed solution to the anti-trust action is for Microsoft to become a central channel for distributing and installing third-party software, rather than leaving that to the third parties?

It was merely one of several examples of ways to download software without a browser. But since you bring it up, it would be nice if they included a method for installing third-party software from the web without a warning about running an executable that could harm or damage your computer.

I was floored when I found out that it actually could. Applications (in the form of MSI files) can be advertised using group policy and made available based on Active Directory group membership. As cool as it is, sadly though, self provisioning of applications doesn't facilitate license compliance or dumb users very well.

There you go. I made a shell script for your grandmother. Just stick it on her desktop (don't forget to give it execution permissions!) and she should be fine. Firefox is just a double click away. My invoice will be in your mail next week.

Your grandmother will buy a computer with a bundled OS, with a web browser included (Windows, Linux, OS X, whatever).

What should be questioned here is the underhand practice of secret OEM contracts, which force OEMs to accept exactly the bundle that MS dictates is acceptable. For example they're not allowed to bundle other browsers. Those same contracts forbid bundling another operating system like Linux with MS products, etc etc. While I understand the reasoning for MS to want to control their distribution and the software that goes with it, but they have forfeited that right by their persistent use of it for anti-competitive ends.

If OEMs are allowed to bundle their choice of browser, and remove the built in IE exec (leaving the rendering libraries in place for any other apps that use it), everyone (apart from a certain anti-competitive monopolist) would be happy.

Do you really think its reasonable to get the average user to use FTP to find and download a web browser? Yes its absoloutley possible to download something like that with FTP, finding it and getting it with only FTP isnt reasonable.

FTP != text based.

Microsofts market shre keeps itself where it is because of compatability. Its a sad and frustrating fact but its how things are. When other products offer the same compatability then we will see microsoft fading into the crowd of other products.

This is like saying Windows is inherently compatible with more software and that if Mac wants more market share it needs to become more compatible with the software that's out there. In other words just because website test for IE doesn't mean IE itself is inherently more compatible.

'Yanno, MSFT could add a list of web browsers to its "Add and Remove Programs" tool. When installing a web browser, the tool could then use FTP (or BitTorrent, or whatever) behind the scenes to snatch the installer off of the web.

I haven't used Vista that much and have an honest question. If this is true can I uninstall IE in Vista?

Depends on what you mean by "uninstall."

If you mean, "does it appear in Remove Programs control panel?" then the answer is no.If you're asking, "can I delete iexplore.exe and all shortcuts/file associations for it?" then the answer is yes, but you could also do this in XP or 2000, so nothing new here.If you're asking, "can you remove mshml.dll and still have a functioning copy of Windows?" then the answer

I personally look forward to when TV's are no longer sold with remotes. Only when we stop the unfair bundling of remotes with TV's will consumers be forced to no longer accept "good enough" remotes when far better remotes are available for purchase.

Personally, I find the whole IE bundling witch hunt paternalistic. Let Opera, or whoever, advertise their products in the marketplace, and get people to buy them. Firefox did that full-page ad and that did far more to increase its market exposure and usage tha

Which is actually not a bad idea. No more having proprietary remotes that are impossible to replace: without tying, remotes would conform to published standards (ideally open and patent free) which would allow choice in the type of remote that you used.

For example, accessible remotes could talk, or have extra large button, and be _guaranteed_ to work with your TV/Video/DVD/Blu-Ray/whatever - instead of the hit-and-miss pot luck you take when purchasing so-called 'universal' remotes these days.

You have unwittingly given a very good example of the problems with tying.

Ok, so I buy a TV and the remote it came with smells up the house or something... I get a different remote of my choice and throw the old one the heck away.

I buy a Windows computer and IE smells up my hard drive or something... I get a different browser of my choice and.... Ok, how do I get rid of IE?

And would a TV manufacturer really forbid or technically prevent a dealer from offering a different remote (presumably with more abilities to increase sales) in complete substitution of their remote? I would ho

So Microsoft did make a 'N' series of Vista (Ultimate N, Business N, Home Premium N, Home Basic N etc.) for EU, basically that's have the Windows Media Player and all the WMV/WMA functionalities removed. (i.e. Sound Recorder can't save in WMA)

But I doubt if it's cheaper than non-N version. (Could some people in EU tell me?)

If EU is going to be decided as antitrust, Microsoft will just make the N not to include the browser. Who is going to lose?

People are drastically missing the point here. Nobody's punishing Microsoft because they're Microsoft, and nobody's saying you can't bundle a browser with an OS.

The facts are these:
1. You can't leverage a monopoly in another market.
2. Web browsers and operating systems are separate markets.
3. Microsoft has the monopoly on Operating Systems.
4. Microsoft leverages their Windows monopoly to further their browser market share.

So nobody is saying Microsoft can't bundle a browser - they just have to provide options. Make it so you can choose your browser on install, make it so the OEM can choose a browser to bundle with default installs, whatever. Some sort of choice. You can bundle fifty browsers if you want. Just don't bundle your own and only your own.

As of now the problem isn't that Microsoft is bundling a browser, it's that they're bundling only their browser and offering no options to anybody.

In all likelihood, Microsoft would not actually remove IE, they would just create a registry key that enabled or disabled the web browser functionality. Such a key might already exist, put in place just in case the US government demanded that they remove IE from Windows.

As a web developer, I really and truly hate Microsoft from the bottom of my heart for the steaming pile of incompatibility that is IE.

However, I cannot conceive selling a consumer/business OS without a web browser these days. From the end user perspective, browsing the web is simply a piece of basic functionality. What's more, it would make windows the only consumer grade OS that does not have a browser after installing a graphical environment. OS X has safari. The major desktop environments for *nix h

It is a part of the Windows OS. To be more accurate, the underlying technology is an important part of its UI. AFAIK, no Linux distro integrates any kind of browser in that manner, though with some of Mozilla's newer technologies, I don't find it all to improbable.

It is true, though, that now it is much too late for any kind of useful decision to be made. Which is what Microsoft has counted on all along.

What browsers on the market charge for their product? Only Opera that I am aware of.

They haven't charged end customers for a desktop browser since 2005. Version 8.5 dropped the requirement on the desktop.

Opera do still charge for their Mobile browser - the binary platform-optimised version for mobile phones. But they don't charge for Opera Mini, which is the J2ME version of their mobile phone browser.

Basically, Opera have been moving away from charging the customer unless there's clearly a market for it. Optimising a browser for a phone is difficult and expensive, and many phone companies have done an awful job of it - hence charging for the mobile version. But that's changing, so the mobile version might either die or go free at some point in the future.

Opera are a business, so they have to make money somehow. I'm afraid that this isn't 2001, and business plans in the "... Profit!" model don't actually work.

Most of Opera's revenue doesn't come from end-users. It comes from licensing and customising their browser product for OEMs. For instance, Nintendo paid them to produce the web browser that they use for their Internet Channel on the Wii...

It sounds like Opera is blaming Microsoft for their lack of marketing and letting people know they have a choice.

Opera is complaining that Microsoft are illegally abusing their monopoly by bundling one product with another. It's the same complain Netscape made in the US, the same complaint that was upheld in the US, and the same complaint that the US failed to meaningfully punish.

In the end I don't really care because I use Linux and none of this (a?)effects me.

I'm posting this from Opera (9.6) on Linux (Ubuntu 8.04), so haven't the foggiest what your point was there...

The question I have for Obama is this: Who is stimulating the economy? Me, the guy who has provided 14 people good paying jobs and serves over 200,000 people per year with a flourishing business? Or, the single fat colored mammy sitting at home pregnant with her fourth child waiting for her next welfare check?

Far from helping the economy, Microsoft has harmed it. It has reduced competition in the computer industry, which means fewer jobs and higher prices. It has a long history of pushing for H1B visa increases intended to reduce the average wage of skilled tech workers. Why when there are so many people out of work are they STILL pushing H1B visas?

Also, Microsoft is an abnormally profitable company. That comes from somewhere. For every dollar that Microsoft makes in profit, that could have been $0.25 ~~ $0.30 to a normally profitable company. Which means, because of Microsoft's monopoly, we have one business employing fewer people instead of 3 or 4 business of roughly the same size employing 3 or 4 times that number of people.

Microsoft should be broken up by the government as an anti-competitive monopoly.

It's the IT version of the moronic "those illegal immigrants are stealing our jobs!" idiocy. Possibly racism, too. I love the H1B visa program; our QA team consists of a Chinese woman, a Indian woman, a Armenian man, and an British man, all top-of-their field. The H1B program is the kind of "mixing pot" laws that made America great, and will continue to do so.

You've actually nailed everything that's wrong with antitrust law!Your suggestion is basically this: MS is really successful. Like, really really successful. If we were to just give a little bit of that success to other companies, many other companies would be successful as well. To achieve this distribution of success, we should break up Microsoft. Basically, you're advocating punishing success!

That is, of course, the Bill Gates argument. "I'm successful, so let me be successful." Al Capone was successful as well. Standard Oil was successful too.

Microsoft is successful because of its illegal and unethical actions. Its "success" is at the expense of the consumer and the industry. That sort of "success" denies a functioning market place of greater success.

Q: How do you know a liberal has lost an argument?
A: They start calling you names

Which would make Rush Limbaugh a liberal. It would in fact make the Bush administration liberal throwing the name terrorist around way too freely.

That would make you a liberal as well as a lot of so called conservatives since anyone that doesn't fully agree with their opinions is a socialist, liberal or pinko.

Q: How do you make a liberal sad?
A: Remind them of their carbon footprint

Q: How do you make a liberal angry?
A: Tell them a Capitalist is making money off their carbon footprint

The biggest problem with this as a whole is it's just baseless name calling from a racist simpleton.

It ignores the fact I'm a conservative but a real one which believes in actual conservatism and not pandering to the South and their huge population of low-IQ, high religion gullible dimwits, like yourself.

Capitalism isn't about breaking laws and shitting all over everyone. Maybe when you understand capitalism then you can start your own business, make a decent living and stop resorting to being a grumpy little racist tit.

They might be able to get away with obeying the court's decision (provided that is there decision...there's still time for Microsoft to bribe them like they did at ISO for OOXML) for every release of Windows from 7 onward. I somewhat doubt - unless the EU is really that hellbent on punishing Microsoft for all its evil deeds - that the order would be retroactive for all previous versions of the operating system.

(provided that is there decision...there's still time for Microsoft to bribe them like they did at ISO for OOXML).

The ECJ is not some dinky little standards body. The ECJ is a immensely powerful court composed of some of the most powerful people in Europe. Its decisions legally bind entire industries and countries. It is more like the SCOTUS than ISO

I am not saying that the members of the ECJ are incorruptible, just that Microsoft, as rich as they are, have nowhere near the means to corrupt them.

Of course, this is not in the court system yet. Right now it is being handled by the European Commission's Directorate General of Competition, which is kind of like the US Attorney's office in the US. This institution exists purely to find and punish anti-competitive behavior. Its members live under a microscope and its deliberations are a matter of public record. They regularly go after massive European corporations openly supported by member State governments.

Some foreign IT company is not going to have the means to corrupt this body, either.

Nah, they wouldn't have to go that far. I'm sure the nice folks at Opera(and Mozilla as well) would be happy to settle for having Opera and Firefox preinstalled along with IE on a default Windows install, and then letting the user decide which one they wanted. Then they wouldn't have to rip IE out and Opera couldn't claim an unfair advantage, since their browser was right there on the desktop besides IE. Shouldn't be hard to add Opera to the disc image either.

Removing IE breaks a lot of functionality in XP, so I doubt they can simply have bundled and unbundled product lines like they do with WMP. Windows would require massive retrofitting to make IE that replacable.

They tried that defense (intimately tied to the OS) at the original antitrust trials and an expert was able to remove IE back then in less than an hour.

The FACT that Microsoft has made IE more indespensable to windows, not less, pretty much is giving the Justice Department a big middle finger. No Linux distro I know of nor OS X fundamentally needs it's OS to do updates or anything like that. It's just BS on MS's part.

I hope they get shafted by the EU, since I feel shafted everytime MS forces me to use IE for one of their piddly little tasks.

Perhaps not, but I bet they use TCP/IP stacks and such that are built into the OS, and I bet the user interface is displayed using GUI libraries that are supplied as standard. Desktop operating systems didn't always come with TCP/IP stacks and GUI libraries, and people used to sell products that supported such features as add-ons.

And, if you think that your super TCP/IP stack is better than the native kernel version, you are free to make your own distro that includes it. If you have a GUI that is way better

"Windows would require massive retrofitting to make IE that replacable"

Which really says a lot about how far they have gone to maintain their dominance since the Win9X days when IE could still be exorcised by programs like 98lite.

While they might just have to hide IE for the short term, I think in the long term they should be forced to correct Windows and IE to make IE a properly uninstallable program. It is how it should have been from day one.

If the EU wants to be consistent, they would have to require Apple to remove iTunes, Safari and iLife from every Mac delivered in Europe. That means you either have to download it or buy the software as a separate cost item.

In the end, I think what EU really wants is to strip down Windows 7 so it has the same functionality as the first release of Windows 95--you have to install the web browser, media player and possibly the fast disk search functionality separately.

I seriously don't think that the EU will personally decide which browser will be included. That would be up to the OEMs.
Though, it is not unusual for a government to give an economic advantage to to local companies. Protecting local jobs is not a new thing by any means.

...how it is that the courts in America ruled that Microsoft was ok to keep bundling IE with Windows, while Microsoft's hopes in the EU when faced with the same issue is basically nil?

The thing is, the US courts didn't rule that it was ok for MS to bundle IE and Windows. They ruled it was criminal. Then, a new crop of politicians were elected and MS was one of the largest donors to their reelection funds. They replaced the people prosecuting MS and the punishment for MS's illegal bundling was no to be broken up so they couldn't do it again, but instead to not even be stopped from continuing the crime. Rather, the punishment was a very small fine and basically nothing else. This proved t

Look in this case it is more like they have their criminal and have a reason, a formal reason to imprison him. It is like Al Capone and the tax authorities.

Microsoft went ballistic against EU institutions and opted for a burned soil scenario. If you negotiate that hard and fool administration it will fight back and they will stab you in the back without mercy. This is exactly what is happening now.

The Opera complaint was cheap but fun. So they make some fuzz. Note that the Commission is in the lame duck per

If GM owned 95% of the auto market and somehow used their monopoly position to, say, put a proprietary, patented gas tank in their car that could only be filled at gas stations owned by GM, that would be a much more valid comparison.

But Mac OS and Linux distros aren't de facto monopolies in the operating system market. If Mac OS came on 95% of computers and Safari was on the machines out of the box, I think the EU would pursue the issue too. It's about using one monopoly/near monopoly position to further another one.

If Microsoft held less than half of the market, I don't think MS would have been the target of the EU for this

Macs
Apple has their own browser (which you can remove, IIRC, but their non-monopoly marketshare protects them from prosecution in any case)

Linux:
Linux folks in general have at least some appreciation of open source software, to the point that some won't even use Firefox (opting instead for Iceweasel, Konqueror, or Ubuntu's 'abrowser'). What hope does a completely closed-source browser have of thriving in such a community?

Microsoft doesn't ship windows with antivirus, arguably a critical component (windows is exploited frequently AND MS recommends AV strongly). I don't see how this is/that/ different to be honest. Not really arguing one side or another here, just saying that both a browser and whatever is necessary to make the OS secure should be included with the initial install.

If IE was as basic as Sound Editor, MS Paint, or Movie Maker you might have a point. But as it is a full featured browser your analogy isn't accurate. Microsoft has not poured billions into any of the programs you mention. Nor have they updated any of them significantly in a decade. If they updated Paint the way they do IE, Photoshop would get trampled. Ditto for the other two you mention. However perhaps the solution lies there. Strip IE down to a bare bones browser with minimal functionality like t

This is asked and answered in several places, but there are a variety of easy ways this can or could be done.

* First, OEMs would pre-install their choice of web browser(s) for you.* Get a CD-ROM with the software from your vendor (Firefox and IE are available on CD* Windows could get with this century and add a friendly non-browser based package manager.* A simple auto-downloader (double-click an icon and it grabs the file).* Other, optional,

Windows would definitely benefit from package management of some sort. Now that I'm used to sudo apt-get install $package, the act of downloading a setup.exe and manually installing software (and sometimes installing other dependencies with setup.exe's of their own) seems downright archaic. If Windows had a trusted repository full of software (kind of like Steam or something like that) life would be so much easier. Linux environments stay clean because most software comes from trusted places instead of bein

The fact that this article got marked as flamebait is demonstrative of how disconnected from reality a lot of people on this site are. What happens when Firefox gets to 50% or more of the browser market? Are Opera going to sue them as well for predative price fixing with Microsoft and Apple? Hell, why not sue GNU for enabling the techinical and legal foundations for creating and distributing free/zero-cost software?

Screw Opera and their retarded, litigation-based business model. I see them as one small

The fact that this article got marked as flamebait is demonstrative of how disconnected from reality a lot of people on this site are. What happens when Firefox gets to 50% or more of the browser market? Are Opera going to sue them as well for predative price fixing with Microsoft and Apple?

You're making a fool of yourself - if Firefox got 50% of the browser market it would be on its merits - not because it was preinstalled on the 'Firefox/Mozilla Operating System'. The whole point - which you are presumably deliberately missing - is that MS uses its operating system dominance to create browser dominance, which is potentially illegal under competition law.Once again:Having a monopoly is *not* illegal;using it to create a monopoly in another area is.

in your eloquence you seem to forget something very obvious. simply create a shortcut in the start menu that starts a little program that 1) asks the user waht s/he wants, 2) downloads over ftp/bittorrent/whatever and 3) installs the browser of choice.it's a matter of attitude. you will only find a solution for a problem if you want the problem solved. if you don't want it solved, then you won't put in the effort that is often neccessary.

The absurdity of this is overwhelming. Nobody ever thinks about why Opera is doing this - it isn't because they love "the people" and want to ensure they get a good browser. It's because they really want some more of that money (yes, yes, Opera is free - I understand their revenue model). What a great way to abuse a bloated bureaucracy - if you can't defeat your competitors in the open market, then get government to handicap them for you.

What's absurd is the average Slashdotter's understanding of economics and antitrust law.

Nobody ever thinks about why Opera is doing this - it isn't because they love "the people" and want to ensure they get a good browser.

This is both a strawman and irrelevant. It's like arguing that when Opera calls the cops after someone robs their office no one thinks if they're doing it out of love of the people. Of course they aren't, but that doesn't mean people think they are and it doesn't mean we shouldn't enforce either antitrust laws or theft laws because of it. Sometimes when people act in their own best interests (like reporting a theft of th